The short version: I am a writer living in Honolulu, Hawaii.

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The long version:​ My feelings on "ABOUT" pages are similar to my feelings on taxes: I have a vague understanding of their purpose, but don't totally know how to do them. As a result, I find myself, at times, gripped by a dull fear that I'll get them all wrong–and that this could cost me dearly (How? Why?).

 

Excuse my neuroses. Sure, it's just an "ABOUT" page, but nothing is "just" anything.

 

In any case, this website mostly exists to direct the few (but surely brilliant) visitors to my writing.

 

A few tidbits:

 

• One of my all-time favorite films is Heavyweights, a 90s-era comedy featuring a deranged, tyrannical Ben Stiller who inherits a fat camp for adolescent boys. (It does not engage in fat-shaming, aside from a few comments intended to highlight Stiller’s insanity.) This film is not at all representative of my other interests, which include (in no particular order): heinous crimes, tofu musubi, anything related to NXIVM, low-maintenance plants, random fits wherein I vow to radically change myself only to discover later that I don’t actually want to do that, Daft Punk, and Zen Buddhism, of which I practice for real at a beautiful zendo in Honolulu.
   

• I love appropriately-used semicolons, emdashes (–), and Oxford commas.
   

• Once upon a time, I blew into a town of about 130 people in the middle of Oregon and then I stayed there for over a year. This town serves as the chief inspiration for the novel I’m currently writing (or, rather, avoiding writing at this moment, as I attend to this “ABOUT” page.)
   

• I have found social media to be corrosive to my writing and creativity. I cannot use it responsibly and this is why you won't find a single social media link anywhere on my site.
  
  Should you find this website via my Instagram profile–forever vacillating between full deactivation and rampant overuse–feel free to DM me: “Get the hell out of here! You should be writing!” (Please let me know you are speaking to me as me, or rather, me as my higher self. I promise I will thank you.)
   

• My favorite book is (and I suspect always will be) East of Eden. I cannot fall out of love with Steinbeck’s sense of rhythm and the warm light that permeates that whole book. (As far as favorite books go, it's a bit of a basic-bitch choice, and I embrace this as wholeheartedly as I do my love for pumpkin spice lattes and Rihanna. Some things are just good.)
   

• The amount of Law & Order: SVU I watch is probably giving me an illness, somewhere deep in my psyche, permanently staining my brain with scenes that should never be imagined much less acted out in a production studio. Either that, or it is reflective of one I already have.
   

• A normal thing: I am from the Pacific Northwest. My hometown lies north of Seattle yet south of Bellingham, snug in an agricultural valley best-known for snow geese and tulip fields. Sometimes I feel PNW to the core: IPAs, smoked salmon, Douglas-firs, Nirvana; here I see (and smell) a campfire deep in the North Cascades. I see green-trimmed ferry boats and lazy sea lions; now bright rioting daffodils in April; now a whirling funnel made of black-tipped wings and multi-layered squawks–those are the geese.
  
  Then I recall the interminable winters with their heavy white-gray skies, my breath visible mid-spring, the so-called cute neologism June-uary. I remember there are reasons I landed on lovely Oahu. Honolulu is like no other place anywhere. It's one big small town and I feel hashtag-blessed to be here despite the cost of living and bad driving habits (I love you Honolulu, but turn signals exist for a reason).
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If you wish to write to me for any reason, you may do so by sending an email:

latroha@proton.me